[someguy1233]

Last time I looked at Play, I took one look at Akka/Reactive Programming and knew there was no chance of me touching that.

I might look at it again, this time staying far away from Akka. What's the performance like? Considering it's Java I would assume pretty good, but I'm not sure how bulky Play is

[scalesolved]

I don't touch any of the Akka stack, I certainly make use of the non blocking parts of the framework where I can. At my current company half our services are in Java on Play and the other half in PHP, the Java boxes run on half the number of servers and lower spec'd than PHP with about a 50% decrease in latency too.